Customer Reviews

The Coming Draft: The Crisis in Our Military and Why Selective Service Is Wrong for America

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Excerpted from my review for The Orange County Register, 10/29/06

"Hell no, we won't go!" seemingly faded overnight ... until last year, when the Army missed its recruiting goal, lowered its physical standards and raised its age limit for enlistees to 42.

Fiercely against the draft, author Philip Gold is a rare military intellectual, a self-described Jewish Marine with fancy degrees from Yale and Georgetown. Shortly after receiving his draft notice in 1970, he brazenly replied to his draft board, "I will never serve in the United States Army. Please stop wasting my time, your time and the government's postage. PS: I recently joined the Marines."

Gold has written six books and over 800 articles during his tenure as a Washington-based think-tanker. It is his humor coupled with an inundation of facts that makes "The Coming Draft" an entertaining and convincing read.

He tightly argues against the reinstatement of military conscription in America, noting that the draft has been always inequitable and rife with loopholes for abuse. Conservatives may want to bring back the draft to ready our military for more interventions, while liberals believe that more Americans will question our foreign policy when their own rears are on the line for service.

"The Coming Draft" is an important and timely book filled with insights from a deep thinker. Gold's only son recently volunteered for the Marines and may someday serve in a war that his father has strongly opposed since its inception. A draft is not needed for the Gold family, after all.

I am really glad someone wrote about this topic, I do support the draft.
The volunteer military is great during peacetime and at the onset of a conflict.
I am in my 40's and would go if drafted. The author discusses the advantages
and disadvantages of the draft. He makes several points that the volunteer
military is better motivated than a draft military was of the Vietnam era.

Conscription - or the military draft - is the state forcing a person to place himself in harms way - possibly to be killed - and is a violation of the most fundamental premise of the Declaration of Independence, that men are "endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Conscription is dictatorial and antithesis to a free society, because it deprives the citizen of his guaranteed unalienable rights.

In another respect, and this was the lesson learned from Vietnam, conscription is indirectly the state's admission of defeat in war, because if the state needs to force someone to kill or die for his country, the war is already lost.

A book on this subject is a necessity.